No. 1924

Ducks with Olives—Braised

Canards Braises aux Olives

Dress two ducks for entrees (No. 178) and lay them in a saucepan lined with bardes of fat pork; moisten to half their height with a mirepoix white wine stock (No. 419) and let boil, skim and simmer slowly for three-quarters to one hour. Stone about one pound of verdal olives, blanch, drain and add them to a brown sauce (No. 414) stirred in the mirepoix stock from the ducks after it has been strained and skimmed. Dress the ducks, cover lightly with sauce and garnish around with the olives.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with stockpots already on the fire, so the recipe reads as three cross-references and an assembly note. Everything it assumes can be built in a home kitchen with a heavy braising pan and a good stock.

The hinge: skim, then skim againDuck renders a great deal of fat into the braising liquid, and the sauce is built directly on that liquid. Strain it, let it settle a few minutes, and lift the fat off thoroughly before combining with the brown sauce, or the finished sauce will break into a greasy slick.
Bardes of fat porkThin sheets of cured pork fatback, cut to line the pan and keep the birds off the metal. Blanched salt pork sliced thin, or unsmoked streaky bacon, does the same job; smoked bacon will dominate the sauce.
Mirepoix white wine stock (No. 419)In practice a white stock simmered with diced carrot, onion, celery, thyme, bay and a good measure of dry white wine. A well-made chicken or veal stock with a quarter to a third of its volume in white wine and a handful of aromatics stands in for it.
Brown sauce (No. 414)A brown roux-thickened brown stock in the classic mould. A modern reduced veal or chicken demi-glace is closer in body than a flour-thickened sauce, and needs no correction for the olives' salt beyond tasting at the end.
Verdal olivesVerdale, a large green table olive of southern France, sold brine-cured. Any firm large green olive works; Picholine or Lucques are the nearest. One pound stoned yields roughly two cups.
Why the olives are blanchedTwo or three minutes in boiling water, then drained, pulls out enough brine and bitterness that a pound of them will not oversalt the sauce. Skip it and the sauce will be noticeably salty and bitter.
TimingThree-quarters to an hour suits the small young ducks of Ranhofer's market. A 5 to 6 lb Pekin duck needs closer to an hour and a half to two hours at a bare simmer, or in a 325F oven, until a skewer slides out of the leg with no resistance.
"Dress for entrees"Singe, draw and truss compactly so the birds sit level in the pan. The braise gives no colored skin; if you want one, brown the ducks in a dry pan first or glaze them briefly under the broiler before saucing.
YieldTwo ducks serve four to six as a main course, more at restaurant portions. Serve the sauce lightly over the birds, with the olives banked around, as written -- the dish is not meant to be swimming.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some thirty years as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and the book is essentially the restaurant's working repertoire set down in numbered order, which is why nearly every recipe leans on another by number rather than repeating itself. Canard aux olives is a standard of French bourgeois and restaurant cooking, generally traced to Provence and the olive-growing south, where the fruit was cheap and its bitterness made a useful foil to fatty birds; the same treatment is given to duck, guinea fowl and veal. The verdal Ranhofer specifies is a southern French green olive, and its appearance in a Manhattan kitchen in the 1890s is a small measure of how completely Delmonico's imported the French pantry along with the French method.